Minouk Lim (b.1968) has gained international recognition for her sharp observations of the turbulent cultural, economic, and political dynamics in Korean society amidst the rapidly restructured currents of modernization and globalization, through her works that transcend the boundaries of various media.
 
 From fluid and fragile materials, sounds that flow and disappear, videos that oscillate between fact and fiction, to performances completed by the assembly of body and voice, and works where entirely different media translate one another—through these diverse forms, she attempts a redistribution of the sensory, vividly revealing forgotten and hidden voices and figures.

After completing her studies in France, Lim formed a collective called “Pidgin Girok” with Frederic Michon and produced Rolling Stock (2000). Created with the intention of “continuously rolling to bring things to life,” Rolling Stock consists of two versions: a booklet and a single-channel video.
 
Initially produced as a kind of culture guidebook for foreign visitors to the Gwangju Biennale, the project took the form of a booklet. Three years later, it was invited to an exhibition commemorating diplomatic ties with the Netherlands, where the medium was shifted from book to video, once again “re-rolling” the images. Rolling Stock traces and visually reconstructs things that disappear in the fast-paced flow of the city, capturing and accumulating fleeting moments to revive them.

As seen in Rolling Stock, Lim's early works focus on the environment of the "city." After the Yeongdeungpo district, where she lived and worked, was designated as a "New Town" for urban redevelopment, she created the performance video New Town Ghost (2005) set against this backdrop.
 
In the video, a young woman with short hair and heavy makeup sings a song titled "New Town Ghost Song," which the artist composed, while standing on top of a truck driving through the streets of Yeongdeungpo. The video alternates between scenes of the woman passionately singing into a megaphone to the beat of drums, almost angrily, and the bewildered faces of citizens watching her from the street. Through works like this, Lim has consistently explored the memories of urban redevelopment and the resulting damage, bringing attention to these issues in her art.

In Lim’s early works, live performances in urban spaces often intersected with the reactions of passersby, creating more dramatic situations. This approach became more nuanced in her 2009 three-channel video work, S.O.S. – Adoptive Dissensus, where performance and documentary elements intersect.
 
S.O.S. – Adoptive Dissensus is a video piece that captures performances both inside and outside a Han River cruise ship, onto which the audience was invited. The work weaves together theatrical performances that discuss themes of development, preservation, humanity, and the city. Passengers on the cruise encounter various staged scenes: the captain’s speech, protestors with mirrors placed at specific locations along the riverbank, performances by drifting couples, and the voice of a unconverted long-term political prisoner under surveillance.

During the performance, lights installed on the cruise ship illuminate various parts of the riverside, including apartment buildings, large skyscrapers, and construction sites. The audience oscillates between being objects and subjects of the performance, and the multisensory experience they undergo becomes a key part of the artwork.
 
The artist explains, “This performance raises questions about the relationship between speed and memory, resistance to it, and the relationship between humans and nature within the city.” On the moving cruise ship, the audience is no longer just passive spectators. They are actively immersed in the social and historical contexts of the Han River, experiencing the questions posed by the artist in a sensory, participatory way.

In 2011, Lim collaborated with artists from different genres and ordinary citizens to create International Calling Frequency. This work was set against the backdrop of the Myeong-dong Central Theater area, which was then facing redevelopment, with local shops under threat of demolition and protests against the demolitions taking place.
 
Lim collaborated with Minwhee Lee from the band ‘Mukimukimanmansu’ to compose a song, which was then taught to people who had been recruited to participate. Those who learned the song went out into the streets to perform it. The song, without lyrics, became a kind of wave transmitted to those displaced from their homes and places of livelihood, resonating through the city as a voice for the powerless.

Through her work, Lim addresses the marginalized and overlooked places and people, forgotten lives and memories within the context of rapid urban modernization in Korean society, blending performance and documentary. She continues to explore themes of mourning and memory restoration not only through video media but also through sculptural work.
 
In her solo exhibition “The Promise of If” held at the Samsung Museum of Art, PLATEAU in 2015, she presented Running on Empty, which utilized materials often overlooked in art, such as liquids, latex, candle wax, feathers, bone fragments, and residues, to shape ephemeral organic presences. By incorporating multisensory elements like sound, light, and temperature, the work transcends the material properties of the substances used, extending into the emotional resonance of grief and mourning.

Lim also showcased a video work at her exhibition at PLATEAU that reexamines the phenomenon of the Korean diaspora by referencing the 1983 KBS program ‘Finding Separated Families.’ This work later evolved into a piece titled It’s a name I gave myself in 2018.
 
The artist reflected on the moments when families were reunited during the television program, which aimed to reconnect families torn apart by the Korean War over a span of 138 days. On being faced with these scenes, Minouk Lim saw the space of the broadcast as a place for conversations that bring back the memories and history that we have forgotten. This moment raised fundamental questions in her mind about the function, role, possibilities, and superficiality of media, becoming an unforgettable "event" etched into her memory.

In her work, Minouk Lim interpreted this situation as the public service broadcaster, which had served on the front line of the government’s propaganda war, being occupied by many people whose families were separated by the Cold War and had to live in silence. The single-channel video work It’s a name I gave myself primarily captures the reunions of separated families, focusing on individuals who lost their families at such a young age that they can no longer even remember their own names.

This year, Lim showcased her work in the solo exhibition “Memento Moiré” at BB&M, where she expanded her artistic world into abstract and symbolic dimensions such as myth, ritual, and totem, transcending the boundaries of specific places and times. Notably, her new series of paintings employs materials that she has primarily used in the past, such as polyurethane and bone fragments, to express themes related to cosmology, mystical iconography, and the remnants of nature and civilization.

For instance, the series Almost Too Calm (2024) features works that depict everyday objects that have served their purpose, such as cuttlefish bones, barnacle shells, dried seaweed, camera straps, and roller shade pulley, as if they are preserved under a transparent layer of polyurethane. This form of embedding the remnants of nature and civilization prompts viewers to imagine a future museum that preserves the legacies of extinct cultures.
 
Through various media and materials—video, sculpture, and everyday objects—Minouk Lim’s work evokes the scars left by the ideological divisions of the Cold War and the underlying rapid social changes, continually re-rolling these obscured or omitted, ghostly presences back to life. Additionally, she imagines the existence of non-human witnesses and calls forth forgotten things in new ways through the connections among active objects.

“My work throws the question on the relationship of memory faded by speed, resistance from it and the relationship between human beings and nature inside the city.
 
This rapidly changing environment erases our memories and we have to prepare ourselves to let go of the memories without making them. The dizzy process of ‘globalization’ seems as though ‘we have already seen it’ and ‘we have already lost it,’ while wondering about the restless time.”

Minouk Lim holds a Diplôme National Supérieur d'Arts Plastiques (DNSAP) from École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. Lim has been the subject of solo exhibitions and projects at such important institutions as the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2018); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2017); PLATEAU, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2015); Portikus, Frankfurt (2015); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2012); and the National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (2011).
 
Her work has been included in group exhibitions at museums throughout the world, including Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2022); MAXXI, Rome (2019); Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2015); and Kunsthalle Wien (2015). She has also participated in numerous international biennials, including Gwangju (2021, 2014, 2008, 2006), Lyon (2019), Sydney (2016), Liverpool (2010), and Istanbul (2007), as well as in the Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane (2021) and the Paris Triennale (2012).
 
She is the recipient of the Obayashi Foundation Research Program grant in 2023. She was also honored with the 2024 Asia Arts Game Changer Award presented by Asia Society New York.

References

• 임민욱, Minouk Lim (Artist Website)
• BB&M, 임민욱 (BB&N, Minouk Lim)
• 올해의 작가상, 임민욱 (Korea Artist Prize, Minouk Lim)
• 서울시립미술관, S.O.S. – 채택된 불일치, 2009, 임민욱 (Seoul Museum of Art, S.O.S. - Adoptive Dissensus, 2009, Minouk Lim)
• 국립현대미술관, 임민욱 | 국제호출주파수 | 2011 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea (MMCA), Minouk Lim | International Calling Frequency | 2011)
• 리얼디엠지프로젝트, [RDP 2022 / Artist] 임민욱 (REAL DMZ PROJECT, [RDP 2022 / Artist] Minouk Lim)
• BB&M, 임민욱: Memento Moiré (BB&M, Minouk Lim: Memento Moiré)